And don't forget: your hair and eye color do not rule you out of either of these seasons. To my knowledge (and I research this stuff), only one woman mentioned in this post is a natural blonde. And it's dark blonde. :-)

Hey, thank you for this great article :-D Hope all is going well on your side! I think these differentiation posts are tremendously helpful, as distinguishing between the subseasons is always the most difficult. And there are so many subseasons you can do this on, haha! Here's to hoping for more in the future, and I wouldn't mind a post of distinguishing between the lights, haha. Christine says it's by green-yellow vs. aqua, or pink vs. peachy-pink or respectively how much yellow the person can take :-) That is a good thing to begin with and the one that keeps me believing I'm a Light Spring :-D

Thanks for this article! I’ve been torn between these two springs myself. This article makes me think I’m more of a Light: I do wear warm pinks well and I don’t think that deep green would work on me.

I first figured I was a Light Spring when I began reading about the 12 season system, but recently began to question that. One source of confusion for me is the color brown. I’ve looked at pictures of color swatches/fans posted online, and the Light Spring ones have little or no brown in them. I get complimented a lot when I wear certain browns and tans....That was the main reason I figured I might be “spring flowing into autumn” or Warm Spring. I do see “camel” recommended a lot for springs in general, but a google image search came up with some wildly different interpretations of what camel actually is. Anyway, what exactly is the deal with springs and brown? Is brown a colour that can distinguish Light Springs from Warm Springs?

Also, I came across this thread : http://seasonalcolor.yuku.com/reply/306/Spring#reply-306 It has a number of spring fans, swatches and palettes in it. Near the bottom of the first page someone posted the Warm Spring fan from ‘Pretty Your World’ and it DOES appear to have a warm pink or two in there. Of course it’s hard to tell online.

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Emily

5/8/2011 07:49:21 pm

Hi, Rachel! And hi, new baby!

Question for Rachel, (when you get the chance, LOL):

It's not all that difficult, conceptually, to explain the difference between Light Spring and Bright Spring, but when I look at photographs of both seasons' colors, neither fan looks crazy-bright, and the Light Spring colors, though not quite as bright, look very saturated. I feel as though it would help me understand Light Spring colors better if I could see Summer's mutedness in them at all, but at the very least, they don't seem less bright than True Spring's colors. Indeed, some of the Light colors above are easier to see as having brightness/clarity than Spring's buttery yellow, dark pine green and almost brick-like coral.

Lauren Ambrose's aqua green dress is Light and delicate, but the color also strikes me as rather bright. It looks very similar to an aqua dot on the best picture I've seen of the Bright Spring fan, in fact. (I can't take that color much more saturated in my imagination, not without changing its depth, too). Light Spring's aqua may not continue to deepen to Bright Spring's jade green, but as I understand Sci/Art, no two seasons actually share any colors. Except for the part where Bright Spring gets away with levels of darkness and contrast that Light Spring does not, I struggle to understand how the medium to darkest Light Spring colors show Summer influence when compared to the light to medium Bright Spring colors, with their Winter influence. Both sets of colors are cooled; one set is darkened, the other lightened. But since both fans contain lightest, medium and darkest dots, some of the level of depth still overlaps. What is the difference between Winter's cooling effect and Summer's, when Summer doesn't *seem* visibly to mute the colors?

The 12 blueprints post, 'Louise and Stevan are Light Springs' also shows Light Spring colors that are surprisingly dark and, best I can tell, very saturated. Louise wears a pink drape that is very light and reminds me a little of Summer, but the aqua drape and especially the dark purple drape... Do they only seem bright because they are worn by a Light Spring person? I have a few reasons for believing I'm a Bright Spring, not a Light Spring, but whether the hue of the purple drape (which looks more classically middle-purple than any of the shades of purple that happen to turn up on the Bright Spring fan) is a Bright Spring hue, it does not look obviously too light or too muted for me.

Curiously, I don't seem to have this problem understanding the difference between any of the other paired neutral sub-seasons. Soft Summer seems very different, hue for hue, from Light Summer. Soft Autumn is very different in its very character from Dark Autumn. Dark Winter and Bright Winter might be the second hardest to distinguish, color for color, but Bright Winter is so bright that the colors seem to sing, and Dark Winter's colors don't do that.

It troubles me a little bit that my best explanations of Light Spring vs. Bright Spring seem to come down to: 'Light Spring gets to do less stuff.' It needs less color, but it also gets less color. I feel sure that this is a misunderstanding on my part. Even when we talk about color as a quantity (as in,'that season can take a lot of color, but that other season can't') we're not literally saying that the latter season's colors are not beautified in some unique way all their own.

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Meredith

5/10/2011 02:28:15 am

Emily, I'm so glad you posted these questions! I'm also torn between Light and Bright Spring, and your questions are similar to the problems I'm encountering. I've looked at the Pretty Your World Bright Spring, and it seems to be similar to my coloring, but I'm just not positive. I do have naturally blonde hair, but it has faded to a darker blonde (maybe a level 8) since my days of platinum youth. And then I read on 12 Blueprints that Bright Spring and Light Summer both have a pink-ish undertone, but Light Summer's is not quite as bright. I have what most describe as warm skin, but wear many cool colors well and thought this could be because I have a warm overtone with a cool undertone. So now I guess I'm torn between three seasons: Bright Spring, Light Spring, and Light Summer.

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Emily

5/12/2011 08:20:14 pm

Hi, Meredith! If Rachel doesn't mind me butting in, I'll let you in on some of the wiggedy-wack methods I've tried to use to distinguish between Bright Spring and Light Spring, with some vague possible help regarding Light Summer. As indicated above, I still feel that there must be a 'twist' in the personality of Light Spring's colors that distinguishes them, swatch for swatch, from Bright Spring - something other than 'less bright' and 'less deep.' And I don't know quite what that thing is. But I've tried to make good use of everything I do know about each season, in to figure out which one works best for me.

1. I have learned some interesting things by dressing and undressing in front of the mirror. Especially if your wardobe has a lot of color variety (mine was excessively, hilariously mixed), you have full-spectrum bulbs in some room of the house, and you happen to be an inveterate layerer. I can't seem to let myself out of the house without 3-5 different colors on at the same time. :o)

Sometimes I am looking at, say, a dress that I've put on, squinting at it, wondering, 'Does it look good? Does it not?' and I honestly don't know anymore. But if I watch myself as I keep adding stuff, I can often see the skin getting better or getting worse. One day it was a brown dress that improved immediately when I wore it over a (Spring) gray top - like, it became suddenly *relevant* to my body in a way the brown dress alone definitely was not - and then the outfit really clicked when I added a hot pink sweater over that. Obviously, the brown dress didn't become 'my season' just because I wore something Bright with it, but the instant improvement showed me what my skin had been looking for.

Other times, I've figured out which colors looked better and worse by watching myself remove clothing items. Once, my face cleared with each layer I removed. Another time, I was wearing a navy dress I thought was good enough - even though I suspected it was too dusty to really match Spring swatches - but the instant I took off a Brighter sweater, exposing more of the dress, the skin around my eyes turned instantly grey! If you can figure out even a couple of colors - black, peach (Light Spring seems to have a much higher emphasis on peach), pastel blue - that you're pretty confident only belong to one or two of the three, try wearing them together, and watch to see whether the outfit gets better or worse as you layer.

-Some of your possible seasons look very good in colors that are among the worst - from what I've read - for the other seasons. Black is flattering for Bright Spring but supposedly among the worst colors for both Light Seasons. This may sound crazy, but the other night in a moment of doubt I fished out a black wig I have from an old halloween costume and tried it on to see what effect all that harsh black around the face would have on me. Honestly, I would have predicted it'd be too harsh for BS, also - but verging on life-sucking for a Light. But I think it actually made my face look... sweeter. Warmer. More alive, by contrast. The result was nothing like Winter - no force, no bold drama. Instead, softness, rose-petal pink and increased delicacy. (I am not accustomed to thinking of myself as delicate, ftr). Meanwhile, one look I've seen suggested for LSp sounds like it would be a huge mistake for a Bright Spring: a whole ensemble of beige and cream. I know there are a lot of beiges - probably even some of the colors in the BS fan would be called beige - but beige and cream just sounds like it would be so drab on me, and two of the worst colors I've managed to find have been beige and tan. I literally can't remember when I'd last seen a color introduce a really ugly tone into my face, but the beige and the tan shades I tried were gasp-inducingly awful for me! (Entertaining!)

Meanwhile, even if I don't see a clear distinction between Winter influence and Summer Influence in BS and LSp swatches, it certainly sounds like Winter and Summer have a strong impact on LSp and BS' worst colors. LSp and LSu will both wear more pastel blues than Bright Spring, and Rachel says pastel blue is often a worst color for Brights. I honestly owned next to none, because pastel blue hasn't really been my taste, but I tried on a pastel blue top in a store not long ago, just to see what happened. In David Letterman fashion, I asked, 'Is This Anything?' And it just wasn't. It wasn't *anything.* About as dull on me as Autumn brown.

Meanwhile, bright fuschia is listed as a worst color for LSp, and I've definitely tried deep, very bright fuschia items that didn't involve enough yellow to actually suit (probably BW instead), but they were far from worst colors on me. They were *almost* right.

Light peach is another color that might help. There's a lot more peach and blush in LSp than in BS, and while I do like blush pink on me, I find that peach doesn't do much for me at all. Very 'meh.' It certainly doesn't light my eye up to the almos

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Emily

5/12/2011 08:25:44 pm

...almost frightening degree that the Bright Spring colors do. Light Spring yellows also come across more like butter and cream, while Bright Spring yellows look more like citrus to me. I have a pretty high tolerance for very bright yellow, and it makes the iris of my eye go *crazy.* But I find that lighter yellows are either no harm, no benefit or they visibly need perking up - say with a bright green patterned sweater layered over top.

3. They're not kidding over at the 12 blueprints fb group when they say that we're not as sentimental about our hands as our faces, so nail polish is a great way to observe reactions in the skin. Ever since I've learned to recognize yellowing and greying in my skin, my relationship with nail polish has gotten really rocky! There have literally been nights that I have put on my nail polish and taken it off again three times, because I could see the bad effect of a color instantly.

I don't yet know how to distinguish between light shades of Bright Spring and medium shades of Light Spring - I wish I *did*; once everything you wear is supposed to be Bright simultaneously, you start to value low-key options! - but I can tell you at least one BS-approved shade that I doubt LSp would wear: Rimmel Lasting Pro in 'Posh Pink.' It looks alarmingly hot pink in the bottle, but when I put it on my nails, the blotchy skin of my hands settles down completely. It looks neither yellow nor grey. And I don't get the knobbly Wicked-Stepmother-from-Cinderella hands that I've always gotten when I paint my nails too dark or too dramatic a color.

There have got to be some LSp and LSu-only colors that can help you distinguish too warm from too cool. (The challenge, from what I've seen, will be finding enough LSps on 12b to get recommendations).

4. This probably won't help with LSp or BS, but: which grey is your grey? I fell in love with grey some time last year, long before I'd heard of 12 season color analysis, and I started collecting basics in grey. But I didn't notice that my original grey items were yellowed grey, while some of the later items I purchased were blued, pinked or even pure Winter grey. Only the yellowed grey items look right on me. You wouldn't think it would be enough to make a difference, but blue-grey and pink-grey, both of which are Summer, look physically disconnected from my body. If you're either kind of Light season, you're a Spring/Summer blend, but at at the end of the day, a Light Spring is a Spring while a Light Summer is a Summer. Christine Scaman suggests that greys for all three Summers will be similar enough to be almost interchangeable (possible exception for Soft Summer?) and the same for the three Springs. But Light Spring will wear Spring grey, while Light Summer will wear Summer grey.

5. How much yellow can you take? If I wear True Spring, my face visibly yellows, but it also comes alive with a healthy flush. Pretty sure, even if I'm wrong about BS/LSp, that I'm Spring to the bone! A Light Summer has some Spring influence, but I'm guessing that given the way Summer shrinks back from heat in colors, Light Summer won't be able to tolerate the warmth of True Spring, while for Light Spring it might be decent: close-but-no-cigar.

6. My biggest reservation with Bright Spring has been the fear that I am not, personally, bright enough. I can see, over and over again, that the season works for me. Like any good working theory, it is *predictive.* When I try something new - something that a BS would do - it always seems to work. The eye lights up in a way I'd never previously seen before.

But on some level, I still feel like an ordinary, brown little bird. It's frustrating to feel like the colors light my skin up from the inside, while still worrying that someone so ordinary as me can't possibly compete with such bright, pure color.

But here's the thing: Bright Spring nude lipsticks are *nudes* on me. And the lipstick palette I recently received from Elea Blake is perhaps most miraculous in the regard that it is not *visibly* bright. At all! The colors just look like ordinary, mild red or gentle berry colors on me. I think it would take a talented arm-chair analyst to guess my season based on EB lipstick, because it doesn't look like I'm wearing anything special! It just looks pretty. I feel like that has to mean something, right? I mean, some lipsticks look bright (but maybe really good) on Bright Spring and Bright Winter, but if Bright lipsticks just look normal, that seems to be saying something about the colors in the face...?

Can you design an experiment of some kind around this question? Clinique All Heart is neither a nude for Bright Spring nor is it one of the brightest shades recommended. Revlon Ravish Me Red, I've heard, is actually darker than BS' darkest coral red dot and doesn't match. (Though I still like it - for a red lipstick). But find out what you think of Rimmel Coral Shimmer or MAC Bombshell. These colors look pretty bright in the tube,

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Emily

5/12/2011 08:27:56 pm

... look pretty bright in the tube, but are completely subtle on BS. (For this reason - their subtlety - I love them!) I wouldn't be surprised if other seasons can wear them, but perhaps they'd come across as more visibly bright?

And perhaps nude shades for LSp and LSu will clearly betray warmth or coolness in the one who wears them? I find that the flush in my ears gives me away, LOL. I either lean warm or fall bang in the middle of my neutral season; if I wear cooler lipstick, it may clear my face, but it doesn't match the pink flush of my ears!!!

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Emily

5/12/2011 08:43:58 pm

Oh, one last thing I forgot:

Probably the single best reason I have for thinking that I'm probably BS, not LSp is that when I put something bright near my face, my face always 'pushes back.' It brightens to compensate. The eye, in particular, intensifies with each bright addition.

It may be hard for me to see my bare face and un-ornamented hair as anything special - and, after all, there is nothing special or remarkable about 'the Brights'; they're just like any other Season - but for whatever bizarre reason, the colors of my face try to keep pace with whatever bright color is put near them, rather than washing out or shrinking back. Does this work for you also?

Maybe this works for all - or at least several - of the seasons, but given that it is quite possible to make a 'Bright' look drab by putting her in a dull color (she may not just 'own' it; it may diminish her), I wonder if this little observation has something to do with what 'Bright' means. Maybe it means we don't look our best if you don't give us something to 'push' against?

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Meredith

5/13/2011 04:42:48 am

Thank you Emily! Your response is so helpful, and I especially am keen on your nail polish swatching tip.

Based on some lipstick swatching I've done, I'm probably not a Light Summer. I look good in a fair amount of blues, but I think that's because of my blue eyes.

As for Bright Spring, I just feel like I'm having to talk myself into it. I've always felt that light blonde hair, blue eyes, and fair skin that I must be a light season. But I just always seem to look a little blah in the lightest colors. I can wear some of the brighter Light Spring colors, but like you mentioned, a cream-beige ensemble would wash me out.

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Meredith

5/13/2011 04:20:25 pm

The more I think about all of this, the more I wonder about the idea that everyone in a season can wear any of the colors. I mean, each person's coloring is a little different, a unique color combination. So is it possible that people will simply never have quite the same palette? For example, could I just be a Light Spring suited to the brighter colors of that season? Or a Bright Spring that needs some of the lighter colors of that season's palette?

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Ashley

5/13/2011 05:41:28 pm

Yeah Meredith, it makes sense that there would be variation even within a single sub season. I've come across discussions of women labelling themselves as "on the cool side of spring", etc. Maybe none of your seasons's colours will be bad on you exactly, but some will have that wow factor and some will be sort of blah.

I do think Light Spring fits me best, but I don't think I'm quite as "delicate" as some of these color swatches and clothing recommendations seem to think. I've looked at Lora Alexander's outfits she's put together, and she uses a lot of pale colours: beige, cream, delicate yellow...I look at them and think, well I know I'm not exactly suited to deep colour, but I can take more than THAT. Geez. (That long coral-ish pink silk satin gown though? Perfect colour for me.) Might I just be on the richer side for a light spring? From what I've seen of the color swatches, I just think I can go a little deeper.

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Meredith

5/14/2011 04:31:11 am

Oh man, I love that coral pink dress! So pretty. But yeah, some of those outfits are just too delicate for me, even though I'm pretty light.

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Z

6/30/2011 12:50:08 am

I've been trying to sort this question out for some time. Eventually I decided on True Spring, but have now decided that I was wrong. Not completely wrong since my best lip colour has turned out to be a diluted TSp red, but after about 6 months wearing TSp colours next to my face, I can see that they're a bit on the heavy side. There's no visible yellowing going on, it just looks a bit heavy ( and I just found out that I can't really take the full heap of pigments of the darkest dots in the "dot bible", it darkens my face). Even though I wouldn't normally go for a beige and cream outfit, I know I can do it, so that should have been something to look for when I decided on which to buy. One of the clues I've been looking at lately is also that I can handle more blue than is in the TSp fan. Really good tips in this article! When someone is in my position, on the border between two seasons, make up trials aren't enough and it would have been really nice to have been directed to the tell-tale colours earlier (since it was obvious from the beginning that LSu was just somehow WRONG).

For me BSp and LSp have very different personalities. Like Emily said: BSp pushes at you (Love that!!). Not LSP. The thing is that LSp is whitened from TSp while BSp is pumped up in saturation to almost neon. BSp is a laser show dance floor - LSp a blooming cherry tree. One has a respectable amount of contrast between lighest and darkest dots, while the other hardly has any contrast at all. Looking at the whole picture by means of layering the different colours, like Emily said sounds like a great idea to me; the LSp "unit" then shows as different from of the BSp "unit". It's not about individual dots as much as about a "whole", every (sub)season is a concept.

I have to thank you a lot for this article and your website. I´ve been analyzing my coloring type, since I always thought to be a summer with blue eyes and natural light brown hair. But my problem was my dislike for pink and berry tones ;-) I don´t know, I just don´t like them on me... make me pale, disappearing... Then I discovered by trying make up, that red coral tones as well as reddish undertoned colors suit me best. Also, I began to read more about PCA and tried to find out my real type. For me this was important, because my opinion is that colors are an important part of our personal expression. But here in Germany, very often they seem to know only the 4-types system of the 80´s as well as there are many summers and winters, few autumns in the south but not so much springs. So first I thought I could be an autumn. But the colors for autumn looked too dark on me. Then I turned back to summer because my blue eyes and the ash to natural brown hair - I can´t really describe my hair: As a baby it had a reddish hazelnut tone, then turned into light golden blonde, as a teen my hair got darker up to a dark blond with golden higlights and then turned to a light natural brown. At least it could be also a summer hair, but my skin was more peachy/reddish and my sun tan even more golden than that of a summer. My coloring is very similar to Charlize Theron´s. So I got curious, but the palette of spring seemed to be too pale on me, I need more color. After a while, finally I got it, that I absolutely couldn´t wear rosé or pink neither as a lipstick. Orange I never tried, but like I said coral red or even darker nectarine are good. Once I head a dark red brown lipstick, but I have to make attention not to get too dark. With colors it´s the same, best suit me a darker tomato red, a golden camel with brown tones, turquoise or aqua - a green blue - a special purple tone, a warm dark gray, and light olive tones. To my suprise I also can wear golden brown. Normal blue, blue pink as well as blue violet look really disgusting on me. Besides cream and ivory even many pastels make me pale. Coral pink should be better than blue untertoned pink, but better peach or more reddish. Now I found out, that probably I´m warm spring, what I never thought. Thank you so much for this awsome website!

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Claudia

4/3/2012 06:51:22 am

Loved this. Just confirms to me that DH is probably a light spring, darling daughter a TSpr.

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anna

4/25/2012 07:48:05 pm

I think Cameron Diaz is a Brigt Spring, she needs a contrast, and her eyes shine. http://www.supervizaz.net/blog/celebrity-a-farby-cameron-diaz-kontrastn-jar

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Jane

6/11/2015 11:29:33 pm

Sorry but I do not think so as BS can fairly well handle black and black looks way to harsh on Cameron.

Thank you for keeping us up-to-date. I must say i enjoy it and learn the many info beneficial.

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Elaine

12/24/2013 03:19:31 am

Emily, thanks very much for your insight. Particularly the part about seeing how your skin changes when you add or remove layers of clothing. Also, I find I'm in the same boat as meredith and find her absolutely right, Dark LSp and Light BSp colors suit me best, though I'd probably same I'm BSP because my skin does seem to be more even and bright in clearer colors and muddied and shadowy in paler colors, especially nudes. However, my super pale skin means that almost any bright color lipstick looks ridiculous on me, especially in winter. However, the overall effect with my darker blond hair and darker greenish blue eyes balances my skin for clothing and eye makeup.

I have medium brown hair w/red highlights, green eyes and very light warm coloring with reddish cheeks. I have tried True Spring colors and they seem to be too bright. Could I possibly be a Soft Autumn or a Spring w/ summer influence? Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated. Thank you!

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Rachel

1/25/2015 04:55:02 pm

Hi!
Any season can have any eye color, any hair color and any *apparent* skin tone. (Cool skin sometimes looks warm and vice versa.) The only determinant of your season is which colors flatter you. So if you feel confident that True Spring is too bright, that would narrow you down to Light Spring, a Summer, Soft Autumn, and perhaps True Autumn. Every other season would have too much chroma.

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Lindsay

11/21/2015 06:22:28 pm

I have no idea what I am! My hair was white blonde as a child, deepened to a dark golden blonde, and eventually brown. I swear my hair is more of a very warm grey than a true brown. My eyes are turquoise and my skin is pretty neutral, but pulls more warm. I do have freckles especially when I've been outside a lot. I look really nice in a light, springy green color but equally as good with dark hair. I thought I might be a bright spring but in black and white photos, my coloring lacks the contrast for that to be true. Help?

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Johanna

12/13/2015 08:31:01 am

Can a True Spring look like an Autumn?
When I look at the celebrity examples online I get a bit confused? I don't look like Amy Adams (my dad does in his coloring) or Nicole Kidman. I guess my mother is a Soft and brother Light Spring/Summer?
I have some similarities to Michelle Williams coloring: the green brown eyes, light peachy skin and the dark/light golden blonde/brown hair.
I've tried on the Warm Autumn colors, which isn't bad, just too dark. And the soft Autumn colors are too grey. It's like wearing black - something to hide under.
I have been analyzed online as a True Spring, but when I look at pictures I don't see my coloring and I haven't found "real women examples" in this season.
Is there any Warm Spring colors I can try on to really know if this is the right season for me?